Go play outside

and don't come back until suppertime.

Does early exercise make life-long changes in the body?

Perhaps for guinea fowl, when the life is relatively short. Maybe for people too, but that sounds like a long study.

Sparks a poppin

I read an interesting article that charged raindrops' charge is sufficient to, with time, blast through many protective coatings, including Teflon.

The question Ni, Berger, Butt, and their colleagues asked was what this charge does to the surface that the drop lands on next. To find out, the team released 35-microliter water drops, about the size of a large raindrop, containing a pinch of salt to mimic rainwater, onto a surface tilted at 50 degrees. The drops slid about four centimeters, picked up a charge, rolled off the edge, and then fell five millimeters onto a copper plate coated with a 60-nanometer film of Teflon, which is one of the most chemically resistant coatings on the market today.

That, btw, is the part that might not model real raindrops accurately--I'll address that in a moment.

The tilted surfaces were mostly chosen to mimic raindrops in the real world. One was a leaf from a Tradescantia spathacea plant growing in one of the researchers’ offices. Another was a PVC foam board from a hardware store. The third one was a sheet of transparent polystyrene sold as window glazing. Only the fourth one, the fluorinated coating on quartz, was more of a lab creation than something people usually see everywhere around them. The charges the drops picked up ranged from 0.2 nanocoulombs off the leaf to two nanocoulombs off the fluorinated quartz. A nanocoulomb in something the size of a raindrop works out to be a few thousand volts.

And yes, electrostatic effects (at raindrop speeds that's a good approximation) distort the raindrop into something pointy that creates a high voltage difference in the fraction of a second before impact, up to the kilovolt scale, which will cause a tiny dielectric breakdown. The researchers find damage to the surface.

The polymer coating is changed by the zap, and the underlying surface begins corroding.

The researchers identified the corrosion products on copper by Raman spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction. They found cuprous oxide and basic cupric chloride, the pale green compound familiar from weathered copper roofs. Elemental mapping of the damaged zones showed oxygen and chlorine flooding in and fluorine and carbon from the Teflon flooding out—exactly what should happen when a coating has been disrupted.

Another study looking at rain on solar cells finds a voltage spike as the drop rolls off.

It seems like a plausible real effect, and suggests that protective coatings (like paint) need to include other factors besides chemistry.

OTOH, the first other study I found (1953) found that raindrops had a little less charge. A nanocoulomb is about 3 esu.

The average measured free charge brought down by positively charged rain was 0.022 esu (.007 nanocoulomb) per drop, and by negatively charged rain was 0.031 esu (.01 nanocoulomb) per drop. The ratio of the negative free charge to the positive free charge brought down by rain was 1.2, while the ratio of the number of negative drops to the number of positive drops was 0.88.

That's quite a bit less charge on the natural raindrops that aren't sliding off a roof or something. Under a tree, the raindrops can pick up an order of magnitude more charge than an unimpeded drop, but still an order of magnitude less than sliding off flourinated quartz. So, under a tree, raindrops could hit a few hundred volts. Unimpeded drops, maybe a few dozen.

Some other studies of raindrops are comparable. This has obviously been a matter of some study--trying to understand what is the relationship of rain and lightning, for example.

And therefore, of course, one can find other, contrary estimates: "At the rain-forming level" 50 esu/gram times .03 gram (.3 for a heavy storm drop) is 1.7 esu (.6 nanocoulomb) (6 for a heavy storm's drop). And another that didn't find much difference in charge with raindrop size. And different proportions of positive and negative depending on the rain type (pre-monsoon, monsoon I, monsoon II).

And "The results show that the magnitude of the electric charges range between 1 and 50 pC (.001 and .05 nanocoulomb) and more than 90% of the charges are mainly carried by raindrops >1 mm, even though most of the raindrops are smaller than 1 mm."

Interesting. My guess from a quick-and-dirty literature review is that the effect in real life is smaller than the lab effect. Nature is always finding ways to erode what you build.

UPDATE: I neglected to mention -- the greatest electrostatic effects appear when the surface being landed on is metal, since charge re-arrangement is easy.

Damaged taste buds

From an article on recovery of radiation-damaged taste: "All the five taste types are seen to decline around the fifth week after the start of RT. Bitter and salty tastes are affected the most while the sweet taste is the least affected."

Recovery of taste function may occur as early as 4 to 5 weeks after the completion of RT. Complete recovery of taste function following RT is still not quantified or reported. Whether the damage caused to the taste buds is temporary or permanent is still unclear. Partial taste loss is seen to be prevalent even 20 years after completion of RT.

This was an overview of studies, which varied a great deal in methods and selection and radiation targets, and only the most general information is obtained.

I've another data point, though. I could appreciate sourdough fairly soon after treatment, and bitter seems to have gone into overdrive. And nobody will be hiring me for wine-tasting in the foreseeable future. After nearly a year, recovery seems to have plateaued. "This is what things taste like now."

FWIW, I lost about 25 pounds, but was slightly above optimum weight so I had some slack available, and am only a little below my original weight now. There's more to taste than just the tongue's part. The nose plays a role, as does the "mouthfeel," and though I couldn't taste sweet for a while I could still feel the effect of sugar. I'm not sure how, exactly, but I could.

Artemis

Some people are excited about the Artemis mission, and others are pretty grumpy about it. Moon shots have been done before, of course, and the thrill isn't going to be the same. I remember the original well.

The same reasons for not doing it at all circulate again: Benefits are speculative, We've got great needs (wars, the poor, etc) that all need dealing with and this is a mere distraction, and so on. There's a new reason too: Why not use robots for exploration since they work so well now.

Of course the benefits of using low earth orbit and geosynchronous orbit are not speculative at all anymore, but we have a better handle on what we can find on the Moon and Mars and a better appreciation for how hard work there will be.

The "How can we spend money on this when we have so many poor/etc" sounds very noble-minded, but that argument has no boundaries or limits. Why did Beethoven waste his time composing music when he could have been agitating for peace and trying to relieve poverty?

No. There are things worth doing, things that make life better, that have nothing to do with the usual list of desperate needs. I judge exploration (physical and scientific research) to be among those, along with arts. "We can put a man on the Moon but we can't fix homelessness." Well, we can carve a Pieta but we can't cure drug addiction--and probably never will. I don't believe the societal-problem advocates should have an automatic veto on the work of the rest of us.

The question comes down to balance. You can overdo anything. And there are several kind of costs to consider: money of course, but enthusiasm and good will too. Thanks to the intervening years of development some effects can be had for much less (in constant dollars) than they could for the Apollo program. Enthusiasm seems harder to come by, for pretty much anything. A certain decadence set in in society, and NASA turned rather sclerotic. Private rockets pack a lot more enthusiasm now.

If you argue that the Artemis program lacks vision--that we're just doing what our ancestors did, just a little bigger; a little larger pyramid this time--I admit there's justice to the argument.

If you complain that it's inefficient to try to loft people instead of robots--granted.

If you complain that the Constitution doesn't mandate research spending like this--well, it doesn't mandate poverty spending either. And several decades of the latter have shown some stubborn problems with poverty elimination and a moral hazard or two as well--the programs are not an unmitigated good.

You could argue that private firms should take up the torch of space travel. I like the idea, though we have a tragedy of the commons problem already.

Where should the balance be--this year? I don't know. Existential problems, such as war or overwhelming debt, may demand cuts to the bone and beyond. We don't have a good track record of facing up to problems and making hard decisions either.

Nor do I know on what scales you weigh conflicting desires: smaller classes or more to teach about?

I do know that if I had funding authority, I'd want to keep trying to explore.

Science and art

Patrick Kurp posted some thoughts on science writing and literature. He quotes Chappell: "Poetry celebrates visual appearance while disciplines like chemistry and particle physics plunge below appearance into a universe often impossible to visualize, a void punctuated by brief pulses and intermittent bleeps of electromagnetic energy. There is, besides, the dread problem of accuracy:"

One could quote Dirac on learning that Oppenheimer wrote poetry:

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say ... something that everyone knows already in words that nobody can understand.

That's probably not being entirely fair to Oppenheimer, though it may depend on which poems Dirac was thinking of. (I don't think my wife would be thrilled to receive such an Epithalamion.)

But in the general case Dirac was wrong, the poetic ideal is to be understood.

"True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd;
Something whose truth convinced at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind."

True, in the sciences and in math precision is vital—a statement should mean one thing only, while in poetry a phrase can stand for or allude to many things—preferably compactly, memorably, beautifully, and rhythmically. "In size, a node; in swing, more anti."

Dirac was convinced of the importance of beauty in physics, that the clumsy expression of the details of reality could be underpinned by simple and beautiful equations.

The language will be unfamiliar to many, but surely this is also a kind of poetry too.

(And it's better poetry than when we try our hands at more traditional versions.)

Blame the ELF's

While doing research for a story, I ran across more detailed information about Project ELF (alternative link) than the news ever carried. Part of the technology is apparently still secret, but it looks like they were trying to use granite bedrock as part of the antenna. It wasted a lot of power, but it worked. At these frequencies (76Hz) people's claims of hearing a "hum" seem plausible. I don't know about claims of harm -- I generally discount those unless there's a clear physical model to connect them -- but this was curious:

On the other hand, faculty and researchers at the Michigan Technological University (MTU) School of Forestry and Wood Products have found that the Project ELF’s antenna grid makes the trees grow faster. MTU foresters have been studying the effects ever since the system became operational ten years ago.

The forester's final report says "subtle EM effect to the cambial and stemwood growth of some tree species but not to any other parameter". They claimed a relationship between "diameter growth and magnetic flux density" for aspen and red maple, and "annual height growth and magnetic flux density" for red pine.

That looked like an increase when the field was O(2-3mG), dropping off to "normal" for higher exposures. My first guess when seeing something that only effects a few species is a "look-elsewhere effect", but there's enough similarity that maybe it's worth looking at in more detail. I wonder what the conductivity of the sap is in the different species.

Squirrel!

Yes, I know there can be confounding factors, like distance from a cleared area (they look at that) or herbicides

Hands-on science demonstrations

The elementary school science night is coming up next month, and I'm debating what to demonstrate this year. Part of the point of it is getting the kids up close and personal with the equipment (or the rocks, or the crafts, or the snakes in the case of the snake show people), so the demonstations have to be short – no big lecture hall demonstrations, all hands-on or hands-close.

I have the usual lasers and lenses, diffraction gratings and polarizing filters, and this year I can do a double-slit demonstration too. And I can do some electrostatics demonstrations this year, not just the usual magnetic field demos.

A kids' favorite is the Newton's cradle with 1 pound steel balls. It is a bit too battered to be a nice momentum/energy demo (it doesn't keep clacking back and forth for very long), but with bits of paper in the middle there's a nice connection to meteors. Unfortunately the fishing line breaks a lot on that one and the younger kids want to make the balls flail around, so it needs extra supervision.

This year I got a cheap geiger counter, and wonder if some simple demonstrations of radioactivity are in order. Pro: they may not see this again until college, if then. Con: some people freak out easily and fear is contagious. But then people seem OK with the snake demo crowd, so maybe that's OK.

Since I'm alone at the table I have to supervise all the demonstration gear and do the spiel for the current demo at the same time. That's another limit on what I can do.

I've a uranium glass plate that makes the counter sing, but not much else. I could open up a smoke detector (I'm not such a fool as to try to get the source out of the well, though), but I'd probably get in trouble for that unless I posted it. The counter's not sensitive enough to pick up potassium chloride pills, much less bananas. The old thorium lantern mantles haven't been made for years. Any inexpensive suggestions? I can order some uranium ore, but I've already got uranium in the plate.

What would you have gone for? This is indoors, so nothing explosive or flammable, and the age range is 4 to 11 years or so.

A daughter generally does rocks and minerals at a different table. A rocket club shows some of their rockets but doesn't launch anything. A pity. Outdoors we could tether a rocket to wrap around a bar, or try a pinwheel.

Locality

AVI posted a link to a Steve Hsu podcast (sadly without the slides) about using AI as a kind of "idea generator" linking concepts in physics together -- untrustworthy, but sometimes says something worthwhile. He wasted time on some of the ideas, and found another useful -- and published a paper on the result.

By using AI, he means using several different AI systems, and then cross checking them. If they converge, there might be something useful there. Or not.

Anyhow, the useful idea was based on one of his own papers which showed that a non-linear version of Schrodinger's Equation was going to be "non-local" too: namely that regions that are distant from each other would be correlated/entangled instantaneously -- before light could travel between them. (To be clear, he works with the field equations, since that's simpler for his plan.)

That sounded curious. Quantum mechanics does seem to be linear--at energies below those where general relativistic effects would matter. We don't know what happens when GR and QM have to play together, but non-linearities seem likely to me (admittedly not an expert in that particular field).

The paper discusses non-linear models that involve powers of the wave function. Recalling that the wave functions are going to be linear in the sense that if A is a solution and so is B, A+B is too. If the wave function enters the equation as, for example a linear term plus a square, that square term will couple near and far components automatically. E.g. if "n" represents the near part and "f" the far-away part, (n+f)^2 will have terms like n*f and f*n, connecting near and far from the get-go.

That's the simplest way to put a non-linearity in, but it doesn't seem the most likely, if only because it will automatically ruin locality. Physically, you'd expect something more like a "back-reaction" non-linearity, where the energy of the wave pushes on the vacuum, which "pushes back." For example, an electric charge in space results in an electric field in which there's a non-zero probability of pair-producing (temporarily/virtually) an electron and a positron, which briefly interact with the original charge. Hawking showed that this can be non-trivial for gravity and black holes.

That would give a non-linearity restricted to the effects local to the history of the wavefunction. If one electron has been sitting here and another on Alpha Centauri, if they haven't been there long enough for light to reach from one to the other, the local volume that light can have reached and returned would represent, in my naive model, the volume of the wave function that could contribute a non-linear effect to the electron "here." The Alpha Centauri's contribution is nil until enough time has passed. (And of course, at such a distance the effect is utterly trivial, but it's the principle of the thing.

Now you will ask if I will "put my money where my mouth is" and write an equation for an example. Let me get back to you on that. You'd think in the simplest case one could add in a term like $\alpha \int_{t_0}^0 \int dA \psi(\vec{x}, t-t_0)$ where $A$ is the shell about the given point at radius $c(t-t_0)$, $\alpha$ is some small constant, and $t_0$ is the creation time of the wave function. But I can see that's likely to be bit messy, especially with inserting a "creation time" boundary condition.

I'll play around with it a bit and see what happens.

UPDATE. That integral should include a $f(t-t_0)$ inside that I left off (brain freeze), representing the falloff (e.g. something like $1/r^2$) of effect with distance. $\alpha \int_{t_0}^0 \int dA f (t-t0) \psi(\vec{x}, t-t_0)$

Mold and radiation

You probably read about the study cultivating Cladosporium sphaerospermum on the ISS to see how this radiation-hardy--nay, radiation-using--mold would handle radiation in space.

OK, backing up. You probably read the reports that a species of black mold was happily growing in a radiation area in the Chernobyl reactor building. It not only wasn't getting (obviously) killed, it seemed to thrive better. "Melanotic fungi migrate toward radioactive sources, which appear to enhance their growth."

That led to a lot of studies of melanin and radiation. In vitro studies suggest that melanin is capable of harvesting electromagnetic energy similarly to, but less efficiently than, chlorophyll--and apparently at higher energies than chlorophyll (which absobs in red and blue bands: roughly 1.8eV and 2.8eV).

Interesting. So the experimenters put together a sealed pair of test chambers (and a duplicate to run on Earth), with two scintillators, one for each chamber, to detect radiation. (Their sensitivity peaked at about 50KeV energy deposited in some unspecified time.) Above these were petri dishes, one of which had been innoculated with mold spores. They kept them cold so the mold wouldn't start growing until they got into space, and once in space every 35 seconds they measured the temperature and the amount of the surface that turned dark with mold. The mold grew just fine. They looked at the difference between the "counts" (number of scintillator signals) in the control side and the moldy side, and found that the difference started at about 0 and grew as the mold did.

Now the difference isn't huge: about 2.6%, which, since the "shielding" was only one-sided you could double to get what the effect would be if you were surrounded by this in your spacecraft. 5% reduction would be nice, but not really worth the glowing headlines. And you can see the error bars on this. But there does seem to be an effect. The dotted lines at about 20 and 200 hours represent times when they estimated that mold had achieved 50% and 100% surface coverage. They had a camera and an algorithm...

Now even medium energy particles are going to do some damage going through creatures. I don't have any idea how a chemical could harvest medium energy photons and electrons resulting from the initial particle going through at some random angle, and suspect it isn't possible.

Low energy photons and electrons would be another matter. We have, in chlorophyll, a proof of principle that if you go low enough in energy harvesting is quite feasible. Even electrons knocked loose with low energy won't go far. But how do we get from here (e.g. MeV protons) to there (10's to 100's of eV photons)?

Researching that was a bit frustrating. The concepts are easy enough, but illustrating with examples, not so much.

At high energies, a photon interacting with matter loses energy by kicking loose electrons, and pair-producing electrons and positrons. Each of these is typically high enough energy to do the same in turn, and you get an exponentially growing number of particles up until their energies drop below the threshold for such fun and games. (And yes, the positrons eventually annihilate and produce photons.) This is all well understood, and well modeled, and I'd hoped to show the rest of the story. Unfortunately, the old standbys of Geant and EGS don't try to follow the showers all the way down.

Once you get below about 1KeV, molecular differences have a very strong effect on the outcome, and just modeling a shower in a nice uniform material like iron gets very complicated. The difference between interacting with an inner shell and an outer shell electron isn't negligible anymore.

So while I could show the cascades that happen from high or medium energy to fairly low energy, I cannot illustrate how the rest of the shower goes, as a (e.g.) 10KeV photon produces weaker photons and electrons which in turn produce less energetic ones.

Near the end of the low energy shower, an electron or photon of a few eV can excite, or perhaps even ionize, a molecule of the scintillator. When the excited electron returns to its original state the molecule produces a photon in the visible spectrum. It'll go some random direction, but if you have enough excited molecules (meaning more energy dumped into the scintillator by the incoming particles), enough of them will head in the direction of the light-sensing part to produce a signal. In really sensitive systems, all you need is one, but your noise rate goes way up, so typically you'll set your signal threshold a bit higher.

Two or three of these visible-light photons hitting your phototube (or equivalent detector) at about the same time will make a little electrical signal that you can amplify, and count if it is bigger than your threshold setting.

FWIW, layering scintillator and stuff to stimulate showers (like iron, lead, what have you), produces showers that produce amounts of light roughly proportional to the energy of the initial particle--which is very handy. Calorimetry. Anyhow, this experiment was just using scintillator in counting mode.

I'd be interested in seeing what photon energies these molds are capable of harvesting. Experiments like this subject them to a broad spectrum of energies. It's probably pretty hard to do--the tunable x-ray systems I know about are designed for radiation doses that would probably toast the molds (you can give plants too much light too).

More as I learn more...

Cell or organism-centric radiation tolerance

A while ago I proposed that the "radiation tolerant" animals inhabiting hot areas in Chernobyl would be slower-growing.

My idea was simple: radiation damage is mostly to proteins, not nuclei (tiny targets). To survive losing the use of proteins, you either need to have different ones than usual whose folded shape is stable with respect to local ionization, or you need to have spares handy. The latter is way easier to arrange, but the price you pay is that you need to actually make more of them, which takes nutrients and energy. If you spend more of your nutrition making more robust cells, you won't make them as quickly, which means the organism is slower-growing.

It occurred to me that this is a cell-centric model, which looks good for single celled organisms (e.g. molds, if you're curious what I've been reading up on recently).

One could have an organism-centric model of radiation resiliance, in which the organism "assumes" that cells are relatively disposable, and generates (and ages-out) cells more rapidly than a normal organism has to.

This too demands more nutrition and energy, but growth rates should be comparable to normal strains of the organism. The organism should need more food than normal to maintain weight -- though I suspect there'd be a lot of variance and you might need larger sample sizes for the study.

The organisms might die younger, too.

Bodyoids?

First Things has an article on zombies.

The MIT article Ethically sourced “spare” human bodies could revolutionize medicine proposes using lab-grown brainless human bodies for spare parts and testing.

One point jumped out at me:

Recently we have even begun using for experiments the “animated cadavers” of people who have been declared legally dead, who have lost all brain function but whose other organs continue to function with mechanical assistance.

Does that make your hair stand on end too?

On the lighter side

I almost missed this: the IgNobel prizes for 2025. Example: the Pediatrics prize The present study investigated the effects of garlic ingestion by the mother on the odor of her breast milk and the suckling behavior of her infant. Evaluation of the milk samples by a sensory panel revealed garlic ingestion significantly and consistently increased the perceived intensity of the milk odor; ... That the nursling detected these changes in mother's milk is suggested by the finding that infants were attached to the breast for longer periods of time and sucked more when the milk smelled like garlic.

BBC spotted the Engineering prize: a study on using UVC in shoe racks to elminate odor. (It works, provided you don't run the light too long, at which point the shoes start to smell like burnt rubber.)

The Peace prize went to a study showing that "drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak in a foreign language". "Participants who consumed alcohol had significantly better observer-ratings for their Dutch language, specifically better pronunciation, compared with those who did not consume alcohol."

Eye of Sauron

This is cool. A research team discovered that a blazar's jet cone is pointed almost directly at us--we can see inside. The image above is their calculation of the magnetic field direction based on the polarization of light. Different regions along the jet are thought responsible for producing all manner of radiation, from radio waves to neutrinos. When such an energetic (Doppler shift of 30?) beam strikes gas clouds, the collisions produce new particles (e.g. pions), which when they decay produce neutrinos--which IceCube has detected coming from this blazar.

Time dimensions

My sisters took exception to my statement that the story about the claim that physics simplified if time was really three dimensions playing roles at different scales was all over the news. I guess we read different news.

Anyhow, I felt well enough to tackle the paper today, and well, ...

He sort-of motivates this framework, and gives a pretty generic description of it in Section 2. I was hankering to see where the different scales kicked in. I'm still waiting.

In Section 3.1 he pulls a rabbit out of a hat. Likewise in 3.2. And... He never shows how he derives anything.

But: "The theoretical predictions and numerical calculations presented in this paper are fully described within the text"

Maybe the rest of the text is somewhere else? He cites some of his own work Charge as a Topological Property in Three-Dimensional Time which goes into a bit more detail, but I still don't follow how the different time scales emerge, nor how you can have the specified symmetry if they do have different scales. Nor how he gets 1/3 of a charge for quarks but whole numbers for leptons.

Maybe he explains how they have different "symmetry orders" in another paper he cites. I will not hold my breath.

Two time dimensions apparently are plausible possibilities in string theory, except that they don't work very well there. I did a little of my own noodling on possibilities, which I'll try to post--no string theory required.

Hair

A skull from China has been tentatively identified as Denisovan thanks to DNA and protein fragments. So, given the skull, they have a reconstructed face.

Hairy.

Humans grow head hair continuously (modulo a spot of baldness: In this world of toil and sin, your head grows bald but not your chin. Burma-Shave). If you don't keep your hair clean you're apt to get vermin, and if you don't keep it trimmed it is apt to get in the way. How do you do those things without tools? Gnaw on it? And perhaps Gary Larson (Far Side) could do justice to stone scissors, but I can't. Lay the hair across one rock and drag another back and forth until the hairs are ground in two?

Perhaps it was curly like sub-Saharan African hair. It can grow quite a bit longer that way without getting in the way (hair tends to break after a while). That doesn't explain why would it grow as fast as it does, though it's another option for the reconstruction people to consider.

I don't think we started growing straight hair like mad until we'd already developed tools for dealing with it. Some suggest singeing or flint scrapers (ouch, ouch). And you can groom with mud, which would help keep the vermin down, and maybe do a bit of automatic hair breaking (effectively trimming) when the mud cracked.

One instance of laptops in the classroom

I've read complaints that students aren't attending to class lectures but to distractions on their laptops. I can believe it--the temptation to distraction is gigantic. For me, anyhow.

I used to go to collaboration meetings for CMS at CERN. The ages of the participants ranged from early 20's up into 70's. The first meeting was held in the main auditorium, and the first talk was the last quarter in review, plans, and status of the machine. Everybody went, and I invariably got there late enough to either have to stand or at best sit in the far back. (the morning after a long flight and time zone shift, of course)

This was followed by overview talks from the various detector groups and physics groups--no details, just the big pictures.

The hall was dark so you could see the slides displayed.

That is, it was dark in the room until the first talk ended. Then there came a brightening as hundreds of laptops opened.

From the back I could see a sampling of what people were doing. About half started finishing up their own powerpoint presentations, and most of the rest were answering emails or working on code: Slowly, because the WiFi wasn't quite up to handling a hundred laptops at once.

This anecdote is probably not applicable to your average college student.

Dripping

The headline at SciTech is evocative: Scientists Discover That North America Is “Dripping” Down Into Earth’s Mantle.

Although the dripping is concentrated in one area of the craton, Hua said that the plate appears to be interacting with material from across the entire craton, which covers most of the United States and Canada.

“A very broad range is experiencing some thinning,” Hua said.

The image that comes to mind is water dripping from a faucet, which on the small scale is pretty dramatic, with a lot of shake-up. If you scaled that up, you could imagine a blob pinching off under the continent (e.g. New Madrid) with a resulting big up-bounce afterwards.

(Bigger image here)

But the "drip" is into a medium not much less dense than the dip itself, and the sizes involved suggest a much slower and wider "bounce". A simulation suggests "drips" of order 50km and timescales of order millions of years, not seconds.

Stresses and stress relief might trigger some other fault into action, of course.

Interplanetary infection

Some years ago I wondered if Mars could be infected from Earth and then revisited the question, with the likely answer being "no." Another group decided to investigate life traveling to Venus instead.

That's "downhill," so you don't need as much energy to launch the bits of bacteria-laden rock, so the odds of it being sterilized in the blast are minutely smaller. OTOH, Venus isn't exactly the easiest place to live. Maybe some extremophile bacteria could survive, if there was something to "eat." Some bacteria survive here by oxiding using sulfur, but something had to produce the available sulfur in the first place. (geological chemistry? I don't know the mechanism) A huge amount of what's around us is shaped by life: O2 in the atmosphere, for instance.

Venusian microscopic life doesn't seem impossible--high up. Given what we know now. Maybe something will change the picture later...

Particle Fever

The documentary Particle Fever has a trailer out. The trailer telescopes events from several years into two minutes, for drama's sake. That's irritating by itself, but the repeated claims people make about how much this is going to change things is very offputting. Maybe it's a fine documentary, but hype makes me very itchy.

It quotes a man who spent most of his career on this single project.

After my degree, I spent mine on several different, mostly related, projects; experiments with hundreds and sometimes thousands of colleagues. There were a few whose contributions exceeded a percent. I was not one of those few.

I had other things that grew to higher priority--that's a good reason, but not the whole. But I can imagine--better than imagine, I saw it now and then--the "I've dedicated my life to this, so it better not fail" attitude. Surrounded by like-minded people, it can be hard to remember that the money to pay for all this is a "grant", not something earned. And when you're reminded of this (by editorials, budget cuts, and whatnot), it's tempting to exagerate the benefits. It's the center of your life, so it's obviously a big deal, right? And given two equally good projects, the best salesman wins.

Most of the scientists I knew had lives outside the lab; families (rarely large), hobbies (skiing is inexplicably popular), some were religious too. One also managed a farmette and owned some rental properties, another wrote an NYT bestselling novel. (I have a ways to go yet on that.)

How the mighty are fallen

Fermilab has had some issues with performance and meeting goals recently. Evaluations ranked it as the second worst in the country.

I recognize very few of the names. It has been quite a few years since I spent much time there, and even then I hung out with colleagues and not the administrators, or even the staff. I just didn't stay long enough each time. (and the names I recognize are some of the good guys)

Apparently they centralized Safety, which then lost close contact with the Divisions.

Fermilab's leadership is accused of cronyism and allowing a "toxic work environment." The incidents documented were certainly toxic; perhaps this was widespread, perhaps not.

Giorgio should have run the paper by a proofreader before submitting it; in one case the text reads the exact opposite of his obvious intent.

One of their problems is the ratio of administrators/auxilliary staff to actual workers and scientists. Part of what causes that imbalance is the regulations--even something like purchasing differs so much from ordinary business practice thanks to the many extra rules(*) that it constitutes a specialty of its own, and one scarce enough to demand high salaries that cause dissatisfaction among the already-working staff--assuming they are permitted to pay the high salaries. (If not, positions don't get filled.)

And they've made it harder and harder for the public to visit. The cited reason was security, but the lab does no secret research. Safety I could believe--you could kill yourself if you got into one of the labs and started monkeying with some high voltage or gas systems, and if you broke into a source cabinet you'd get the newspapers freaking out, though the danger was objectively less.

(*) When I was there, a colleague employed by Fermilab instead of a university had extra hoops to jump through in order to get travel approved; e.g. prove that American carriers didn't fly to the location, get extra layers of approval--starting long enough in advance that the conference date wasn't always fixed yet.